


A House in Summer

by hydianway



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Canon Compliant, Hurt/Comfort, Lie Low At Lupin's, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-17
Updated: 2017-11-17
Packaged: 2019-01-27 00:36:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12569712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hydianway/pseuds/hydianway
Summary: R/S Games 2017 - Day 29 - Team SiriusSirius lies low at Lupin's, but he's afraid he's not as welcome as he'd like to be.





	A House in Summer

**Author's Note:**

> **Team:** Sirius  
>  **Title:** A House in Summer  
>  **Rating:** Teen  
>  **Warnings:** None  
>  **Genres:** Romance, Hurt/Comfort, Canon compliant  
>  **Word Count:** 6800  
>  **Summary:** Sirius lies low at Lupin's, but he's afraid he's not as welcome as he'd like to be.  
>  **Notes:** Thank you to S for the beta.  
>  **Prompt:** #72 - painting: "Bedroom at Arles" by Vincent Van Gogh (c. 1888)  
> 

It is a quiet afternoon in early summer, in the bright half hour before the sun starts to sink in the sky, when its warmth hangs lightly in the air and bathes the walls and roof and garden of the small house near to the cliff’s edge in a soft, golden light. The blinds are drawn over the window on the brightest side of the house, but the windows are open, and there is a man in the kitchen, directing several knives to chop vegetables as a pot of some kind of sauce simmers on the stove. The man is in shorts, though the pallor of his legs suggests that this isn’t something he’s lately made a habit of, and a worn black t-shirt. Although the interior of the house is tidy enough, there is a distinct air of neglect to the garden, and even some of the darker corners of the interior, that suggest the house is only infrequently lived in.

The man in the kitchen turns his back on the window to check a recipe book on the other wall, and it is then that a great, shaggy, black dog pushes the gate open and lopes up the garden path. Its movements are slow and weary, and it stops midway up the path.

The man inside chooses this time to turn back to the window, and a breeze blows the curtain up at just the right moment for him to see the shape of the dog warp and shimmer in the air, and for the dog to transform into a painfully thin, dark-haired man whose clothes are hanging off his body by their very threads. He takes a few steps up the path as the man in the house freezes, every muscle in his body radiating tension, the expression on his face leaving it very much ambiguous as to whether he’s surprised at all to see a dog transform into a man on his garden path, pleased beyond all knowing to see the man in question, terrified, angry, or some combination of the above.

When the man on the path collapses forward onto his hands and knees, the man inside springs into action, jabbing the stove with his wand to turn off the gas and rushing for the door.

“Sirius?” he says, dropping to his knees on the path beside the other,

“Remus,” says the man on the ground— Sirius— his voice ragged with exhaustion, and he sits heavily back on his heels. “Just walked from Hogwarts. Bloody tired.”

“I can see that,” says Remus, reaching a hand out towards him and clasping his arm just above the elbow. “Let’s just get you inside.”

Sirius sways even under the conspicuous strength of Remus’s grasp on his arm, and Remus seizes the opportunity to pull him to his feet and help him inside before he passes out properly. Sirius leans on Remus’s shoulder, clutching his waist with the kind of gracelessness that could only be borne of exhaustion and a long, storied familiarity, and the two of them disappear through the front door, leaving the gold of the afternoon out of doors to dull, and finally turn into dusk, all as if nothing has happened at all.

— — —

Sirius awakens to a pounding headache and the same ache in his stomach and legs as has been present since he left Hogwarts, or probably before that, back to Azkaban. It’s darker than he expected it to be for some reason, and he can hear someone moving around nearby, maybe on the other side of the room. It takes him a moment, then, to remember where he is. He’s been travelling so long the very idea of having arrived anywhere seems to elude him, but he had arrived, just before, at Remus’s house, and then collapsed on his path out of sheer bloody relief as much as it was exhaustion. He supposes Remus must have helped him inside and onto something you could lie down on, and he supposed he must have fallen asleep shortly thereafter.

Sirius thinks about opening his eyes, wondering if Remus might like to know that he’s awake, but he’s very tired, and for now, the fact that he knows he is, at least in some relative sense, safe, works better than a sleeping draught and he dozes off as soon as he’s had time to finish the thought.

He might sleep truly, he might not, but when he stirs for the second time, he’s aware somehow of the oddness of the hour, a certain still quality to the air that suggests that it’s very late at night. Sirius opens his eyes, blinking away sleep and the grit of the road from his vision, to the sight of a small, somewhat cluttered living room— Remus’s house, he remembers.

The man himself has nodded off under a lamp in an armchair in the corner, hands folded primly on his lap and book set aside on the table next to him. Sirius goes to sit up, and the creak of the sofa springs rouses Remus into wakefulness.

“Sirius?” Remus says, and Sirius can imagine him blinking blearily across the room. “Are you alright?”

Sirius breathes out harshly, most of the way to a laugh. “As well as can be expected.”

“Do you want something to eat?” The floorboards creak as Remus, then Sirius, get to their feet. He desperately doesn’t want to impose, a feeling which is almost entirely alien, having been perfectly happy taking everything he was given by others as his due for the first however many years of his life.

Remus waves Sirius back down, and makes his way over to the kitchen, turning a light on with a flick of his wand as he goes. When Sirius moves to follow him anyway, he says: “if you want to do something, you can have a bath.”

He sounds somewhat exasperated, which Sirius can understand. He probably isn’t all that keen on playing host to the wasted shadow of an old friend and ex-lover, much less one that wakes him up at odd hours of the night asking for food and who hasn’t bathed in somewhere north of a week.

Perhaps the bath wouldn’t be such a bad idea, anyway. Sirius makes his way to the bathroom slowly, body aching, and runs himself a bath in the old enamelled tub. When the bath is full and he finally sinks in, the hot water feels as if it lifts the past hundred miles from his feet and his legs, and the winters spent living rough right off his chest. He stretches himself out slowly, and luxuriates for a few minutes, then sits upright and begins to soap himself off. By the time he’s up to washing his hair, the water is a pale grey-brown colour, with specks of dirt floating to the surface, and he decides not to look too closely at it in the interests of preserving some of the kinder lies he’s been telling about himself and his living situation recently.

He opens the bathroom door to find Remus has put some pyjamas out on a stool in the hallway, and he pulls them on— they’re worn, and softer than anything he’s worn in— well, more than a decade. Sirius walks out into the kitchen to find Remus nodding off at the dining table, and a pot of what looks like chicken broth on the stove. There’s bread on the bench, and a bed is made up on the sofa. Sirius thinks that he must have been longer in the bath than he thought.

Sirius clears his throat. Remus stirs, and turns around slowly to look at him. “Better?” he asks. He smiles wanly, and twists around a bit more to get at the wand in his pocket, so that he can charm the soup into a bowl and bread onto a plate. The food floats over to the table, and Remus gestures to Sirius to sit down after it.

“Thank you,” Sirius says, picking up his spoon.

“I thought— the broth wouldn’t be too hard on your stomach. You know, since I can’t imagine you’ve been eating very much recently.”

Sirius takes a mouthful of the soup, and looks at him, smiling.

“You know, after what I was eating in that cave, I doubt anything could upset my stomach,” he says. “But thank you for the thought.”

Remus returns his smile, and Sirius tries not to notice how strained it looks.

Remus turns his attention to the book on the table in front of him whilst Sirius eats. Once he’s finished— by that time, both of them are nearly nodding off— Remus sends the plates into a neat stack on the bench top and Sirius starts over to the couch, but Remus shakes his head and points upstairs.

“You should take the bed,” Remus says. “It’ll be more comfortable.”

“I can take the sofa,” Sirius tells him, but he begins to follow Remus up the stairs again. “I was just sleeping on it before, you know.”

Sirius can see Remus shaking his head up ahead of him on the narrow staircase. “I’m too tired for an argument, Sirius,” he says. “Just take the bed, and we’ll both sleep the better for it.”

He yawns hugely, and Sirius does the same a moment later, realising that he’s also far too tired to argue, and Remus shows Sirius where the light switch and extra blankets are before heading back down the stairs.

“Goodnight,” Sirius says to his retreating back. “Thank you,” he adds, feeling horribly like it can’t possibly be enough but that he really ought to say something anyway.

The words sound weak even as they leave his mouth, and Sirius almost hopes Remus doesn’t hear them. He climbs under the covers, now feeling every bump on the road again, and not particularly to his surprise, he’s asleep nearly before his head touches the pillow.

— — —

Sirius sleeps like the dead, and wakes to a sun which is already halfway across the sky, light streaming onto the bed through a gap in the curtains. His body aches worse than it did last night, now that the stiffness has had time to truly settle in, and he’s hungry like you probably only can be when you’ve barely eaten in a year and you know that there’s food in a kitchen just downstairs.

He goes to sit up, but his joints protest just a little too stridently, and he sinks back into the mattress with a grunt. Maybe some time to prepare himself for the next attempt at using his muscles.

There’s a print on the wall opposite the door, a painting of a small room with lilac-painted walls and square, practical furniture. The perspective is warped in places so that everything appears slightly off-centre, and there’s a sweet, pastoral green brushed into the windows. Sirius looks a moment longer, and realises there are no shadows in the room, not in any of the places where there ought to be shadows. The whole effect is one of enforced stillness— nothing to hide, the paint frozen mid-movement onto the canvas.

As Sirius sits up— carefully this time— and arranges his limbs to sit on the side of the bed, he wonders if Remus likes living alone. If the single bed and the small room and green in the windows in the print are supposed to match the single bed and the small room and trees in the window of this room and if that’s what Remus wants. No need to share a bathroom or the bedcovers, or have someone wake you up in the middle of the night or far too early in the morning only to have them whinge to you about how you need to pick your clothes up off the floor and do the washing up more often.

Sirius had quite liked living with Remus— right up until the point where he hadn’t been able to stand it anymore— and he’d assumed Remus had felt the same, simply the fact that there was someone who was there at the beginning and end of most days, willing to put up with your ill-tempered mornings or morose evenings and quite happy to go along with whatever harebrained scheme would make a day or an hour most fun for the both of you. But maybe that hadn’t been the case at all. Or maybe it had been the case at the time, but Sirius’s departure had made Remus realise that a solitary life suited him far better, or maybe Sirius is letting his thoughts run away with him, and Remus just likes the painting.

He stands up— carefully— and makes his way down stairs— gripping the handrail like an old man in the vain hope that it’ll put less strain on his aching legs— to find Remus writing a letter at the dining table and there’s a larger assortment of breakfast food on the bench than Sirius has seen in his life.

“Morning,” he says, as he walks into the room. His voice crackles with the dryness in his throat.

“It’s one o’clock, actually,” Remus says, looking around at him. “Sorry,” he adds, seeing whatever expression it is that’s appeared on Sirius’s face. For all Sirius’s natural predilection to sleeping away the days, he’s never really enjoyed it and now he comes to realise, he’s glad that this small thing about himself has remained unchanged despite all odds.

“It’s all right,” Sirius says, then: “I’m still exhausted.”

“You probably will be for a few days, I’d say, if not a couple of weeks,” Remus replies. He points to the food on the bench. “I’ve left that all out for you,” he says, and pauses. “I couldn’t remember what you liked to eat for breakfast.”

Sirius nods. “I think I’ll just have toast, but thanks.”

Remus smiles, the same tight, strained smile that Sirius is thinking he might have to get used to. “Excellent. As long as you do eat something— you’re nothing but skin and bone and it hurts to look at you.”

Sirius returns the strained grin, and picks the bread up off the counter. “I never knew you had it in you to be such a mother hen, Remus.”

Remus smiles genuinely this time. “Nor did I. But I seem to have a weakness for hopeless cases.”

He goes back to writing his letter, and Sirius busies himself with the toaster, which he can’t for the life of him remember how to turn off when the slices of bread inside start to smoke.

“Remus, how do you— oh, don’t worry, got it,” he says, having pressed enough buttons at random to have hit the one that makes the toast pop up.

“Hm?” Remus looks up. “Oh, right, the toaster. It’s got a lot of buttons, doesn’t it? One of my aunts gave it to me for Christmas three years ago and I still don’t know what they all do.”

“It’s fantastic,” says Sirius, spreading jam onto his toast and bringing the plate over to the table to sit down with it. “Bit scary though.”

They sit in relative silence for a few minutes as Sirius eats his toast and Remus continues to write, and Sirius goes back up to the bench to make two more pieces of toast. He wonders if he’ll end up eating half the loaf like he used to do when he was a teenager trying to work out the fundamentals of feeding himself without adult supervision.

He works out definitively which button is the toast-eject button, and stands looking out the window as he waits for the bread to toast. The curtains are up and the windows and doors to the house are open, and outside the sun is bright on the garden and there are sparrows on the lawn through the front door. It surprises him, even after two summers outside of Azkaban, how much actual, physical light there is in the world, if the weather would only choose to cooperate.

Sirius joins Remus at the table again with his new toast, just as Remus is folding his letter up and sealing it with a flick of his wand.

“Who are you writing to?” Sirius asks, mouth full of toast.

“It’s— about a job,” Remus replies, looking around distractedly. “I was going to go for a bit of a walk,” he says after a moment. “I imagine you’re quite sick of walking, but you’re welcome to join me.”

Sirius considers, then nods. He has this tiny inkling of a feeling that he needs to stay close to Remus if he can, if only because he’s the first person he’s really spent more than a few hours in any proximity to in the past fifteen years.

Remus looks a little surprised at that, but he nods amicably enough and says: “I’ll find you something to wear.”

Sirius looks down at himself, scrawny arms and legs sticking out of the sleeves of Remus’s old pyjamas, and grins. “I suppose I don’t exactly look my best in this get up,” he says. “The neighbours’ll have it out that you’ve adopted an escapee from the insane asylum in no time.”

“Might be a good cover,” Remus says. “Better than a rumour that I’ve adopted a mad old fugitive from the law, anyway.”

“Might be,” says Sirius, grinning.

“There’s not many people around here, anyway.”

Remus grabs some spare shoes and shorts from upstairs, makes quick work of the transfiguration needed to make them usable for Sirius, and Sirius remembers to ask him about the sleeping situation as they’re walking out the door.

“We are wizards, you know,” he says. “Surely somehow we can conjure up another bed and then you won’t be put out of your own by whatever bizarre sense of obligation have to me.”

They walk down the path to the gate, and Remus doesn’t reply, apparently having decided to ignore him. At the gate, he pauses for a second, and turns to face Sirius with his hand on the top bar. “Look, if we meet anyone out and about anyone asks you’re my friend visiting from London.”

Sirius nods. “All right.” Remus opens the gate, and they walk out onto the side of a near-deserted country lane— the only company in sight is a group of birds on a hedgerow some distance away.

“I can only imagine what they’ll assume, but hopefully it’ll keep the gossips busy enough they won’t look too closely at who the friend might actually be.”

“I can only imagine what you’re imagining they’ll assume,” Sirius says. “But if I'm anywhere near the mark, it won’t be so far from the truth, will it.”

Sirius sees Remus stiffen out of the corner of his eye, and wonders how he’s misjudged with the reference to their past. Did he somehow think that this could be a fresh start, when the whole reason they’re here at all is so steeped in their history together he didn’t think you could soak it out if you tried.

“Maybe not,” says Remus. He sighs, and fans himself with the underside of his t-shirt. “I swear, the summers get hotter every year. Are you alright?”

Sirius doesn’t feel very spry— quite the reverse— but he nods anyway. “Fine.”

They continue on the country road in peace for another quarter of an hour or so, before Remus seems to sense that Sirius is flagging and hops over a fence into the nearest paddock. He helps Sirius clamber over like an arthritic old man, and starts off diagonally across the field, barely looking over his shoulder as he calls back to Sirius: “We’ll take the short way home.”

Sirius struggles to keep up, wondering apprehensively if Remus’s shortcut is a shortcut only because he walks it at twice his usual pace.

By the time they’re back at the house, Sirius is worn out and all the blisters on his feet feel like they’ve been rubbed raw. He pulls the borrowed shoes off inside the door, and goes over to the sofa to plop himself down with a heavy thump.

“You walk too fast,” Sirius tells Remus, who’s walked straight in and started tidying up a pile of things on the kitchen table.

“Maybe you just walk too slow!” Remus turns to grin at Sirius.

“And maybe you need to show more consideration for those of us who’ve just walked from Scotland.” Sirius lies himself down on the sofa and stretches his legs out in front of him, wincing as his unwilling muscles attempt to engage. “It isn’t as easy as it sounds, you realise.”

“I realise,” Remus says, sounding distant again. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry.” Sirius is too tired again to wonder what on earth he’s trying to apologise for, so he decides to leave it at that. “You didn’t answer me before, about the sofa thing,” he says, hoping that the subject change will clear some of the tension in the air. “Why can’t we just conjure up another bed for the night?”

“Maybe you could, but I don’t think I can,” says Remus, his voice cold now. “I was always rubbish at conjuring, you have to remember.”

Sirius doesn’t remember actually, but he nods like it’s just come back to him anyway. “I don’t think I could either, these days,” Sirius says a moment later. Remus, who’s come over to stand a bit closer to Sirius as they talk, looks at him oddly again, the same look he’d had when he apologised just before, the one that makes Sirius feel strange and a little uncomfortable.

“It’s alright. I might work something out to transfigure it— if you’re planning on staying longer, that is. Plain transfiguration is’t anywhere near as diabolical for me as conjuration, but I’d rather not risk having to change it back too soon and have it collapse on me.”

“Okay,” says Sirius, something sinking like lead in the pit of his stomach. “You know, I think I’m going to go out into the back garden to get some sun.”

“All right.” Remus doesn’t bother with a strained smile this time, rubs a hand through his hair and looks tired. “I’m going to have a lie down too. If you’re hungry just take whatever you need from the kitchen.”

Sirius nods, and makes his way outside, wishing that he knew some way to make things less awkward, to let Remus know that he didn’t need to go this far out of his way for him and for him to feel less like he was imposing so much on Remus’s space and his life.

He spends the rest of the afternoon in the garden, drowsing in the sun and trying to will his blisters to be less painful. It’s peaceful, in a way that he never thought he ever appreciate, much less after after Azkaban and the interminable years of enforced nothingness, but here he is.

Still, his doubts about his place in Remus’s home and in his life continue to gnaw away at the back of his mind, and by the time they’ve eaten dinner and bid each other goodnight— Remus is unfalteringly polite throughout, and there are even moments when it feels to Sirius as if the years between them have just vanished into nothing, but he’s sure he doesn’t imagine the look of abject sadness on Remus’s face when he turns around to see him when he’s sure Remus wasn’t expecting him to, and he has no idea of what to make of it or how to react— Sirius is feeling rather frustrated about the whole thing, and he’s sure he won’t sleep peacefully.

— — —

That night, Sirius wakes with a jolt, drenched in sweat and with a scream dying at the back of his throat. It had been— he hadn’t been able to escape, or breathe, or see anything but the greatest darkness he’d ever known—

He hears footsteps on the stairs, and, still caught in the fight or flight world of the nightmare, instinctively he sits bolt upright in bed, prepared to fight with tooth and nail to get away from whatever it is that’s come to torment him now.

“Sirius?” says Remus’s voice through the dark, then: “ _lumos_ ,” and there’s a small ball of light a few feet away that bathes the whole room in a gentle, warm light that makes Sirius feel more at ease just by its presence.

“Remus?” Sirius manages to croak out. Remus approaches him slowly, like he might an injured animal.

“Yes, it’s me,” he says.

“Just a bad dream,” Sirius tells him, only noticing now how raw and dry his throat feels, how clammy his hands and body are with sweat. Had he been screaming for some time before he’d woken himself up?

Sirius starts to shiver uncontrollably despite the warm night air, and before he knows it he’s enveloped in Remus’s arms, Remus stroking his hair and murmuring soothing nonsense to him as his body trembles, and he can’t seem to be able to stop it, nor calm his terrified racing thoughts, at all. So he clings to Remus, buries his face in his shoulder, and takes all the comfort that he’s offered before it’s torn away.

He feels Remus easing him under the covers, still pressed close to him, and feels him press a kiss to Sirius’s cheek as he settles them in. “You’re all right,” Remus says, stroking his hair and the back of his neck, smoothing the stray locks away from his face as he start to pull away.

“Don’t go,” Sirius tells him, just close enough to being asleep now and so strung out he doesn’t remember to be appalled at the unvarnished need in his voice as he says it.

“I won’t,” says Remus, barely a whisper, and Sirius feels him settle in beside him on the narrow bed, one arm snaking through the gap between the pillow and his shoulder to rest under his neck, the other to rest gently on the side of his torso, calves tangling awkwardly with each other under the covers. It feels familiar, and Sirius realises a moment later that’s because it is familiar— the two of them lying face to face, touching everywhere they thought they could get away with, first in the dormitories and then in their first flat, before they’d gotten together.

The warm glow of the light vanishes with a murmur from Remus, and they’re left in the dark once more, but this time it feels far, far less threatening. Sirius can see a sliver of moonlight coming through the crack in the curtains, and it illuminates just enough of Remus’s face that he can see the curve of his cheekbone, the edge of a long eyelash and the curve of his mouth, so soft in the dark.

Before he can think about it enough to know what he’s doing, Sirius leans forward and kisses him, just once and very gently on the mouth. Remus doesn’t push him away, but Sirius thinks he’s most likely imagining the soft, smiling curve of his lips as Sirius pulls back, and they’re both asleep within moments.

In the morning, Sirius wakes far earlier than he had the day before. By the quality of the light behind the curtains, it looks like the sun has only just risen, and Remus is still asleep with his arms around him and their legs tangled together. Sirius doesn’t move, just watches the gentle movement of light across his face and shoulders as the curtains move in the barest hint of a breeze. He doesn’t move, aware that even the smallest movement or overly confident exhalation of breath could disturb the bodily equilibrium that sleep has created between them.

They stay like that for who knows how long, and then Sirius feels Remus stirring next him. He closes his eyes and pretends to be asleep, knowing that this is what Remus will expect from him, and not wanting to be the one who disrupts the utter stillness of the morning so far.

Remus wakes up, and he must open his eyes, and he must pause for a moment as he takes in the sight of Sirius in his arms.

Then he slips out of the bed, extricating his limbs from Sirius’s as easily as he’d been breathing with him only minutes before and making his way near-soundlessly downstairs.

Sirius feels this awful sinking in his stomach, almost like dread, but for something that’s already happened. It seems to settle the matter in regards to Remus’s feelings about Sirius— he clearly doesn’t want Sirius there as much as Sirius, though he hates to admit it, wants Remus. He decides to stay in bed a while longer, to catch up on sleep lost and avoid the inevitable for another few hours.

— — —

Later in the day, they eat lunch out in the garden, and Sirius tries not to let what he knows now get in the way of anything, because he doesn’t want to let the little time he has left with Remus go to waste.

Merlin knows what Remus is angling for, but he’s acting like nothing’s happened, the picture of kindness and asking if Sirius wants more food when he’s finished and looking concerned when Sirius refuses.

Afterward, Sirius tries to help with getting the plates from the table, but Remus bumps into him turning around in the kitchen, and he sighs huffily.

“I can do this without your help, Sirius,” he snaps, pulling out his wand to enchant the dishes into a neat pile on the bench, and then for them to start scrubbing themselves in the soapy basin.

“I’m sorry,” Sirius says, not meaning it at all. The little collision had been so much of nothing, and he couldn’t see what Remus was so pissed off about at all, until he remembered his own presence in the house he presumably liked to keep to himself. “There’s no need to get annoyed— I’ll be out of your hair in a few days anyway.”

“You’re leaving?”

That Remus looks surprised, even unhappy, at this, gives Sirius a moment of pause about his assumptions about Remus’s feelings about Sirius’s stay in his house, but it isn’t enough to put him off having the argument he hasn’t realised he’s been itching for since Remus’s smiles slipped on the very first evening.

“You obviously don’t want me around— you’ll barely stay in the same room as me unless you've got food as a pretext, let alone talk to me, you won’t let me help you with anything around the house even though I know you hate domestic magic, and every time you look at me you get this look on your face like I’m the last thing you want to see.”

Remus just stands in front of the sink and stares. “Is that really what you think?” His voice is very soft, but not dangerous, just— hurt? But no, that can’t be right.

“What else am I supposed to think? I know you like the peace and quiet of living alone, I know that I about the biggest disruption to that you could get short of Voldemort himself showing up for tea, and I’m sorry, but I didn’t have anywhere else to go!”

“Even after last—” Remus cuts himself off, and his tone changes sharply. “You know what, don’t mind me, you should really just leave if that’s what you feel is best.”

Sirius doesn’t know what he was expecting, but it wasn’t that. “I don’t— ” he starts, then changes tack. “Dumbledore said I should lie low here for a while.”

“Well if _Dumbledore_ said so, it must be the right thing to do. Do you really expect me to believe you listen to anything Dumbledore says?” Sirius has always hated to see Remus’s control slipping, the cool, collected mask of contained fury giving way to something he knows that Remus hates, that he sees as a betrayal of the most important parts of himself.

When the edge of his fury is directed at Sirius, it usually means that he’s pushed too far, and fucked if he’s ever been any good at working out _where_.

“I thought you’d want me to leave!”

Remus turns his back on him slowly, facing the sink, and he sets the cups and plates to drying themselves off and flying back to their places in the cupboards. When he turns back around, his composure is fully returned.

“I’m getting a bit sick of other people deciding what’s good for me actually, Sirius.” His voice is sharp enough to cut glass, and Sirius winces. “As a matter of fact, I do _not_ want you to leave. Quite the contrary, actually. But if you really think so little of me that you think I’d turn you out when I’ve spent the past year worried sick about you, when I’ve just got you back, maybe it’s better if you go after all.”

“If you don’t want me to leave, how is it that half the time when you look at me it’s like I’m the very last thing on earth you ever want to see.”

“Oh, don’t be dramatic,” Remus says, turning around again to do something with the sink.

“Why is it?” Sirius asks again.

Remus sighs, and turns just his head to look at him. “Do you really want to know?”

“Yes,” says Sirius, knowing that he’s treading deeper into unknown territory and that he might not like what he finds.

Remus turns away and bows his head, seemingly unable to look Sirius in the eye. “It’s because, Sirius, when I look at you, I see everything that I’ve failed to do, from when I ever believed you could hurt James and Lily and Harry, letting you go to Azkaban, not being able to help you for the past two years even after you escaped, and now I can’t even seem to help you when you’re in my own home.”

Sirius is struck silent for a moment, but then he’s just furious again, coupled with a hurt that wells up from a place he didn’t even know existed inside of him anymore. “I told you I’d forgiven you,” he says. “I don’t want your pity, and I don’t need your apologies— I told you I’d forgiven you that first night in the Shrieking Shack— if you say you wished you’d trusted me back then, why don’t you trust me about that, now?

“Besides, what good would it have done if convicted mass murderer, Sirius Black’s werewolf ex-lover had tried to break him out of prison,” Sirius continues. It’s a low blow and he knows it, but he thinks it’s at least somewhat deserved. “You’re not naive enough to think it ever might have worked— or do you think they might have let us share a cell?”

Remus blanches.

“Sirius—“

“As far as the rest goes, I think you’ve done all you can— more than you have to.”

“But it isn’t enough,” Remus says, the notes of frustration bleeding into his voice again. He probably hates feeling helpless as much as Sirius does.

“And that isn’t only your problem! Take it up with someone else— Peter, or James’s fucking ghost, or Voldemort, or the actual literal passage of time by this point— but get over yourself.”

Sirius stops to take a breath, and to look at Remus again. He still looks a little pale with anger, but he looks more assured in his stance than he had before, like knowing where he stood even if it had involved Sirius laying into him, was worth more than his pride, at least for now.

“Not that I’m not angry, you know,” Sirius says, now having snapped out of the heat of the moment and compelled to clarify. “But I’ve had a lot of time to think lately, without the Dementors crowding out everything else in my head and making me feel everything I don’t want to feel, and I know I’m not angry at _you_ , not anymore. I think— I just want you, however you’ll have me.”

“Sirius,” Remus says, and Sirius looks at him, making sure to meet his eyes, which, he’s rather alarmed to note, are getting dangerously red and watery about the corners.

Then before he knows it, Remus is kissing him like his last hope depends upon it, and he’s pushing Remus toward the bedroom and their fumbling their way up the stairs any way they can so long as they don’t have to stop touching each other— or in Sirius’s case, twist anywhere outside of the limited range of motion his body will comfortably allow.

— — —

“You know,” Remus says drowsily. “I think I probably could manage to transfigure this bed into something a little larger without compromising the structural integrity too much.”

Sirius isn’t really listening— he’s too busy luxuriating in the feeling of having had someone else’s hands on his body, everywhere on his body, for the first time in so long, with a tiny corner of his brain set aside feeling regretful that he isn’t up to having slightly more athletic sex at the moment.

“Did you always used talk so much about rubbish after sex,” Sirius says in lieu of actually having to listen to what he’s saying. “The rosy glow of nostalgia seems to have washed that part away. Or maybe it was the Dementors, I don’t know.”

Remus lets out a shocked laugh. “Are we allowed to make fun of that now? Or do I have to tread carefully, and not ask you what the Dementors did with your sense of politeness— for example, how it’s very rude to interrupt someone else’s post-coital musings on rubbish.”

“I think your mistake there is assuming I had manners to begin with,” Sirius says. He rolls over and, sort of painfully, manoeuvres himself into a position where he can kiss Remus on the collarbone, and then his mouth. “When I definitely didn’t.”

“Mmph.” Remus adjusts his position in bed to make kissing easier, and pulls away for just a second. “At least this is a nicer way to interrupt me.”

He kisses Sirius, who responds in kind, slowly and leisurely, and things continue in that vein for a comfortable length of time, until Remus stops with a strange look on his face.

“I’m really sorry, because I’m about to say something terrible and sentimental, and it’s going to sound strange at first, but— do you remember the day you left?”

Sirius frowns. “Vaguely.” He doesn’t remember much of 1981 very well at all, consumed as he had been by a fear and a darkness so pervasive that it had almost started to feel like it was taking up the air he was supposed to breathe, but he does recall what it had felt like to walk out of their flat knowing that he had no intention of walking back in again, even if the details are lost.

“I hate to be the one who always remember dates sometimes,” Remus continues, “but just now it occurs to me that it was— hang on— fourteen years to the day since you walked out.”

“And you’re happy about it?”

“Well, no, not as such—“ Remus says, lying back onto the pillow. “But it has this kind of appalling, contrived symmetry to it, and I thought I’d hate it, if anything in my life started matching up like that, pretending anything happened like that on purpose, but I’m rather finding I don’t.”

Something settles in the hollow of Sirius’s chest at Remus’s last words. “Sort of romantic,” he says. “The stars aligning and that.”

Remus grins. “Exactly,” he says. “And I feel like— oh Christ, this is embarrassing— I feel like being reminded of how thoroughly I’d lost you, even before Azkaban— it makes me feel even luckier that you’ll have anything to do with me.”

“As long as I get to do this—“ Sirius rolls his hips suggestively against Remus, which hurts, but he tries not to let it show on his face, and kisses him again— “I have no complaints at all.”

Remus lets out a shaky breath. “Please don’t tell me you’re ready to go again,” he says.

Sirius laughs. “Not a chance,” he says. “Try again in about a week, provided that last bout of very sedate fucking hasn’t made all the muscles in my back seize up again.”

Remus lets out a noise somewhere between and laugh and a snort. “I’ll give you a back rub, you wuss,” he says. “So long as we can stay in bed to do it.”

“Deal,” says Sirius, and kisses him.


End file.
